Luke Wright

The 27-year-old's literary career got off to an unusual start. "When I was 11, I wrote a memoir about my last year at junior school," he says. "I sold it to my friends for the handsome sum of 50p." A dalliance with song lyrics followed before he plumped for poetry aged 16 after seeing a performance by John Cooper Clarke. A month later, thanks to a canny use of his connections, for his first ever gig he was opening for the influential Mancunian punk poet. Unusually, for someone who writes verse, Wright is happy to introduce himself to strangers as a poet; unusually but not unreasonably as it's his main source of income. As well as a prolific writer, he is a pivotal figure in the burgeoning community of young British poets; he programmes and hosts the poetry stage at Latitude - the largest poetry event in Europe - and is the poet-in-residence on Radio 4's Saturday Live. His first solo show was entitled 'Luke Wright Poet Laureate'. He explains: "I wanted to have the shock value, the faux arrogance." He sees the role of poet laureate as "a good PR agent for poetry", and in his own work he seeks profundity in depictions of the everyday. "It's about capturing those moments when you can see the bigger picture". He relishes the traditional and more formal demands of verse: "I love sitting down and seeing where you can go with rhyme and metre. It's half writing, half a crossword puzzle."

Laura Dockrill aka Dockers MC

Quirkily dressed Laura Dockrill could easily be mistaken for a pop star: she's best friends with singer-songwriter Kate Nash, has thousands of MySpace fans, and is a regular performer at Glastonbury and Latitude. The 22-year old, raised by arty parents in south London, is the first performance poet to graduate from London's Brit School, famous for spawning chart-toppers Amy Winehouse, Adele and Kate Nash (who gave Dockrill her first gig - reading a pretend letter from a Rolf Harris-obsessive). "This is my dream! I'd tried acting and scriptwriting but I didn't like other people performing my words," she says. Inspired by Roald Dahl, Tim Burton and her hero Carol Ann Duffy ("I love her! She's blunt, she tells it how it is"), Dockrill's illustrated poems and live performances depict lovers, rude girls and squashed snails. "I'd love to be seen as some mysterious enigma writing amazing gold-dust words - but I'm just saying what I think about things." HarperCollins is about to publish her second collection, Ugly Shy Girl, and she'll spend this summer on the festival circuit. Dockrill credits Pete Doherty with helping revive poetry's popularity in Britain, "Young people have started to draw parallels with good lyrics and poetry. Like leftfield fashion, poetry is becoming part of the mainstream. I hope it's not a fad."

Adam O'Riordan

The Wordsworth Trust's youngest ever poet-in-residence describes himself as a traditionalist who hears "the voices of dead poets" while writing, but he is just as heavily influenced by hip-hop and US TV series The Wire as by Heaney, Yeats, Larkin and Hardy. "I don't feel restricted in using traditional poetic forms," says O'Riordan, 26. "Writing a sonnet is like living in a period house: you can inhabit it in a different way to when it was built. You don't have to dress up in period clothing. You can install mod-cons." Raised on Longfellow's Hiawatha by literary parents in Manchester, he caught the poetry bug at 10 after hearing a Yeats poem in the film Memphis Belle. He began writing poetry as an English undergraduate at Oxford, later studying for a creative writing MA under Andrew Motion, whose output as laureate he believes is "some of the best English poetry of the last decade". His collections, including Queen of the Cotton Cities, have won prizes and earned high-profile admirers such as Seamus Heaney. O'Riordan is optimistic about the future of poetry and has a new-found confidence in his own literary career: "We're animals that exist in language so we will always need poetry. When I used to introduce myself as a poet, it felt like saying 'Hi, I'm a wanker', but now I feel more secure."

Chris Preddie aka Cashman

It took a shattering event in Chris Preddie's life to inspire him to write poetry. Four days after his 16th birthday, his much-loved elder brother was shot dead in a barber's shop in Brixton. Not long afterwards, numb with grief at his family home in north London , he sat down to write. "I was thinking life was not worth living and it all splashed out on a piece of paper. I thought, 'Wow'!" Preddie's life had revolved around street corners and petty drugs deals. Now he began to write and perform, delivering a tough commentary on inner-city life and blending the rhythmic flow of hip-hop with traditional poetic devices. At 18 he won the Poetry Society's London-wide Youth Slam contest. Then "it all kicked off." Preddie, now 22, has performed across the south of England and, as poet-in-residence at Holborn libraries, has started teaching other young writers to express themselves. He is in no doubt as to the relevance of poetry to young people's lives. "It's one of the ways I communicate, and it's one of the ways that our younger people are communicating - laying the facts of their life on the line to make people understand."